Judith and Sidney Swartz Director and Professor of Politics ISIS in Iraq: What We Get Wrong and Shai Feldman Associate Director Why 2015 Is Not 2007 Redux Kristina Cherniahivsky Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor David Siddhartha Patel of Middle East History and Associate Director for Research Naghmeh Sohrabi Senior Fellow n September 10, 2014, President Barack Obama outlined Abdel Monem Said Aly, PhD Othe inchoate U.S. strategy to “degrade and ultimately Goldman Senior Fellow destroy the terrorist group known as ISIL [the Islamic State Khalil Shikaki, PhD in Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS or the Islamic Myra and Robert Kraft Professor 1 of Arab Politics State].” At the core of that strategy, in both Iraq and Syria, is Eva Bellin a systematic campaign of air strikes against ISIS, coupled with Henry J. Leir Professor of the support for local “partner forces” fighting ISIS on the ground. Economics of the Middle East Nader Habibi Subsequent analysis and policy attention have focused largely on the campaign in Syria. This is partly due to the challenge Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies of identifying effective local partner forces in the midst of the Kanan Makiya complex Syrian civil war. But it is also because U.S. policy Neubauer Junior Research Fellow Sarah El-Kazaz, PhD makers tend to believe that they understand Iraq, after having occupied the country for more than eight years. Junior Research Fellows Hikmet Kocamaner, PhD Asher Orkaby, PhD I argue that several assumptions or conventional understandings that are David Siddhartha Patel, PhD guiding U.S. intervention in Iraq are incorrect or, at best, incomplete, in ways Jean-Louis Romanet Perroux that make the emerging strategy against ISIS unlikely to be successful. These include assumptions about the nature of the insurgency, the conditions under which Iraqi tribes might turn against ISIS, and the relationship between Sunni Arabs and the Iraqi government. These assumptions are reinforced in Washington by people with experience in Iraq during the occupation. But successfully countering ISIS in Iraq requires understanding its complex relationship with the Sunni Arab community and recognizing that strategies that worked to reduce violence in 2007–8 might not succeed today. January 2015 No. 87 This Brief explores three assumptions about ISIS in Iraq that are common in the media and in Washington policy circles and undergird the developing American-led strategy. They are: 1. ISIS is foreign to Iraq, and ideological fissures will splinter the current alliance of convenience between Islamists and secular Baathist insurgents; 2. ISIS is so extreme that it will inevitably alienate Sunni Arabs living under its rule; and 3. Iraq has formed a more inclusive government in order to reach out to Sunni Arabs. The Brief examines the origin of each assumption in the American experience of occupation and considers why each is no longer correct, if it ever was. It concludes with a discussion of how these problematic assumptions have shaped American strategy for identifying additional local partner forces who might, with air support, take and hold territory from ISIS. Assumption #1: ISIS is foreign to Iraq, and ideological fissures will splinter the current alliance of convenience between Islamists and secular Baathist insurgents. ISIS developed out of a string of predecessor insurgent organizations that operated in Iraq between 2003 and 2013, most notably “al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers,” commonly known as AQI.2 Although Iraqis over time increasingly filled the cadres of AQI, the organization’s leadership and early fighters were largely non-Iraqi Arabs, including its most well-known leaders, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (d. 2006) and the Egyptian Abu Ayyub al- Masri (d. 2010), as well as the leaders of the wider al-Qaeda network. During the occupation, counterinsurgent analysts typically distinguished between violent Islamist groups in Iraq, including AQI, and what they David Siddhartha Patel is considered to be secular Iraqi nationalist insurgent groups. This latter category a Junior Research Fellow included Baath Party loyalists hoping to return to power, as well as what were at the Crown Center and a often informally described by occupation officials as POIs, or “pissed-off Iraqis”: former public sector employees and soldiers who had lost their jobs, families former Assistant Professor who felt disrespected by counterinsurgent activities, and Iraqi nationalists in the Department of motivated to resist foreign occupation. Islamist and nationalist insurgents often Government at Cornell engaged in pragmatic alliances of convenience; but as in most civil wars, “red- University. on-red” violence between insurgents ostensibly on the same side was common. After ISIS rapidly seized Mosul and much of Northern Iraq in June 2014, analysts and the media largely portrayed this advance as resulting from a pragmatic alliance of convenience between ISIS and secular Baath Party loyalists, most notably the Men of the Army of the Naqshbandia Order (widely known as JRTN, an acronym of the Romanization of the group’s Arabic name) and former officers from Saddam’s Republican Guard. The JRTN is reportedly led by Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the most prominent member of the former Baath The opinions and findings expressed in this regime to have evaded being captured or killed. A New York Times headline Brief belong to the author exclusively and dubbed the alliance “uneasy” and said “the two sides are unlikely to coexist do not reflect those of the Crown Center or if they should attain power in some areas” because “the Baathists, being more Brandeis University. secular and more nationalist, have no interest in living under the harsh Islamic law that ISIS has already started to put in place in Mosul.”3 Indeed, Baathism 2 is often described as a secular, pan-Arab movement of the generational cohort of Baathist officers who have historically hostile to Islamism. In subsequent weeks, joined ISIS. When analyzing Baathist insurgents, many the media and policy makers paid close attention to the analysts continue to focus on Saddam’s senior military situation in Iraq, watching for any evidence of an expected leaders and the organizations they formed in the early falling-out between ISIS and its allies, owing either to days of the occupation, such as al-Douri’s JRTN or Younis ideological fissures or to fears that their ally was becoming al-Ahmed’s underground movement al-Awda (“The too powerful. This expectation, however, was based on an Return”).8 These were prominent insurgent organizations incorrect understanding of this so-called alliance. during the occupation but are now led by men in their late sixties or seventies, such as the seventy-two-year-old ISIS is different from its predecessor organizations in al-Douri. Yet, many of the ex-officers joining ISIS seem to several important ways. First, it is led by Iraqis and be much younger. ISIS’s former Baathists were born in the these Iraqis are almost all former Baathists. The most late 1960s or early 1970s. Although they are forty to fifty thorough publicly available information on the leadership years old today and seasoned insurgents, some were only in structure of ISIS comes from flash drives taken from the their thirties when Saddam’s army was disbanded in 2003. home of the organization’s military chief of staff for Iraq, These are military officers whose careers were cut short who was killed in a raid by the Iraqi military in Mosul and interrupted just when they were expected to have in early June 2014.4 Nineteen of the twenty known top accelerated. They are not seeking, like al-Douri, to return ISIS leaders at that time—including the entire cabinet, to power; they were never in power. Their formative years those serving in the war office, and the governors of were spent fighting, and being imprisoned by, Americans. Iraqi territory5—were from Iraq; the only exception was a Syrian in charge of ISIS’s media relations unit.6 Saddam’s Faith Campaign played an important role in Approximately one-third of those nineteen leaders laying a foundation for this younger generation of military were officers in Saddam Hussein’s military; several and intelligence officers to smoothly integrate into ISIS others were officers in Iraqi intelligence agencies. years later. Descriptions of Iraq and the Baath Party as “secular” ignore the effects that the Faith Campaign had on The self-proclaimed Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has Iraqi society. Launched in 1993, the Campaign dramatically two deputies. The first, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, oversees expanded religious studies throughout the education the Iraqi provinces and was either a lieutenant colonel or system and injected aspects of Islamic law into Iraqi a general in Saddam’s military intelligence (the istikhbarat, society. Amatzia Baram writes that after 1993, “Islam was or Directorate of General Military Intelligence), and suddenly omnipresent: in the schools, in the university, in also spent time as a Special Forces officer in the Special the media, in the legal system, even in Ba’th Party branch Republican Guard. The second deputy, Abu Ali al-Anbari, meetings.”9 who oversees Syrian provinces, was a major general in the Iraqi military. Most, if not all, of the nineteen were Saddam’s final generation of officers entered the military members of the Baath party. and intelligence agencies in a decade when religious education and piety were spreading, and the state and ISIS’s stunning battlefield success is not the result of an Party were actively encouraging its spread among Sunni unstable alliance of convenience between ideologically Arabs. Young Baathists were no longer steeped in secular incompatible predispositions, one Islamist and one secular. ideology; all levels of the Baath Party were now required to It is a result of ISIS fully incorporating former Baathists study the Quran.10 The AQI/ISIS-Baath nexus might have into its organizational structure without diluting its begun in the prison cells of Camp Bucca after 2005, but the ideological commitments.